Posts Tagged ‘IG Index’

This week I opened a CFD account with IG Index and their client service was very good. There was a problem with transferring money from my spread betting account to the CFD and they solved it quickly.

On the other hand I sent to them lists of questions last week and I am still waiting for answers.

I’ve also noticed that they don’t offer the best spread around. On shares Paddypower offers better spread on a random check. But IG Index platform is better…

Hi,

I’ve took 4 shares, 2 from the FTSE 100, 1 from FTSE 250 and one from USA and compared 5 platforms. Very interesting results:

My advice, always compare the spread. There is huge difference between platforms.

A friend of mine lost his nerves on Thursday and decided to go and bet on half of his account on the Dow. So when the Dow was 8250 he shorted it £20 a point with 50 points stop loss.

Mistakes:
1) Never bet of half of the size of your account.
2) Never but never put stop loss of 50 points on the Dow when you put more than £3-£4 per points. The Dow moves so fast that in 2 minutes you can be out. I think this is the first thing the instructor in IG Index has told us. “People put 50 points stop loss on the Dow and don’t understand why they are losing money”.
3) If you decide to put tight stop loss then don’t put it on a nice number like 8300. The spread betting firms know that and will push the price up or down so the stop loss will triggered. In fact this is what has happened to my friend. The Dow went up to 8297, but his spread betting firm quoted 8300 and he was out.

So easily he waved goodbye to £1000 (50 points * £20 per point). I was sad for him because he is a good friend and usually he gives me great advices.

But the next morning he called me at 8:30 am and said I managed to get it back. This time he shorted the Dow without stop loss and he managed to get it back with 20 points profit (£400).

I am always amazed how easy is to loss money and earn money so quickly. I know they in my day job as a freelancer I need to work very hard to earn this while on my spread betting platform I can do it in minutes.

The problem is that I can loss it in minutes as well… But I think this is the problem with spread betting. It seems too easy. If I will only put £200 per point on the Dow and it will move 100 points up, I will make £20,000 tax free. I won’t say it is hard to get it, but you need to have the right strategy and strong nerves . Can you see red on your screen? how do you handle loss? and if you will see that you are down £2000 what will you do? this is the questions you need to ask yourself before. And you can test it. Put £1 per point on the Dow and see how you deal with it when it goes against you.

I know that in the beginning I was panicking. I was so terrified of losing money that I closed positions as soon as they went against me. Or even worst as soon as I made a little profit. But you must learn from your experience and mistakes and move on. I am still not that good on losses but I try not to panic. And it pays off big time.

Have a nice weekend!

It sounds good! You put a trade and once you are in profit you set up trailing stop loss and that’s it. No matter what happen, you will have profit (almost) but in my experience it is bad thing to do and you limit your profits.

This is a good idea when the market moves in one line, down or up. But it is very rare that the market moves this way. So it goes up and then down and up and down. And in the meantime your trailing stop loss can be triged, way before you want it.

I can give you an example. In September I bought Morgan Stanley at 1290 after the share droped down massively. As soon as I bought it, the share jumped to 1500 and I was happy. So I set up a trailing stop loss at 1400 that will move 100 points every 100 points the share moves up. What happened? MS went up to 1700, so my stop loss moved to 1600 then went down to 1586, so I was out, and then all the way to 2300 on the same day. The day after MS jumped to 3300 before it went back to 2700. How many points did I earn? 310. Nice? well no. It should have been 1410…

The trailing stop loss just killed my trade. I tried it two more time and faced the same results. So never again for me. But on theory it sounds good!

Hi all,

In my point of view Ig Index is the leading spread betting platform on the market. They just offer the best choices.

I like:
Many products, all the shares in major markets, trading with options, tight spread, easy to use, advanced stop loss technique.

I don’t like:
No promotional offers

To place a bet or an order it is quite easy and you get used to it quite quickly. In my experience IG Index platform offers the best tools to create an order or ticket as you like. This means you can set up a stop loss, a guarantee stop loss (which is very helpful with shares), limit your profit and trailing stop loss. On top of that you can easily see how much deposit is required which is quite handy.

They have a powerful search engine and it is very easy to find shares. It is also easy to find a product like binary betting or options. They have standard charts but also advanced charts where you can add indicators and set up alerts according to them. So for example you can set an alert to send you SMS when the RSI on the FTSE is below 20. Very good. In fact their alert system is impressive. It is so easy to set one and then when it triggered, get it on your mobile, email or just on the screen with a beep.

It is very easy to manage your account and add or withdraw funds. Their support is excellent and they do offer lots of curses and seminars. I went to one of them and it was good. Very good (yes the food as well).

What I don’t like is the design of the platform. It is quite depressing to sit in front of it for more than 10 minutes. It is plain light blue that compared with that Windows XP looks glamorous. On the technical part sometimes there are errors on Firefox. In fact I can’t make it works on my FF on Vista. So I am using Safari which works fine. It works fine on IE7 as well.

I would also love to see some promotional offers like their competitors but I guess as the market leader they don’t need one.

The last thing that I would like to see is the underlay data which for me is quite important.

Without any question this is the best platform on the net. Well done (just change the design please).